I'm mich. I do some of the web dev work for this website. As you've no doubt noticed, YDN has been updating things recently. It's taken a little while to get it out to all Yahoo! Developer Network pages (we're probably about 90-something % complete), but we're getting there. This week we finished migrating the blogs to the new design. Hopefully you already know that we currently host three blogs here on developer.yahoo.net: the YDN Blog (which you are currently reading), YDN Theater for video, and the Hadoop Blog.

Everything should pretty much be the same, but you will notice that I created new MyBlogLog communities for YDN Theater and the Hadoop Blog. Previously, these were combined with the YDN Blog community. Now each blog has its own distinct community of people sharing an interest in that particular blog.

You've probably noticed that the new YDN design uses a lot of YUI. I've been a big fan of YUI's JavaScript libraries for quite a while - even before joining the YDN team.

We're on site at the MySpace office in San Francisco for the OpenSocial first birthday celebration. Presentations were given by social networking application development companies such as RockYou, containers (websites which integrate an application development interface to allow user-built applications) such as Yahoo!, Linkedin, Orkut, and Hi5 as well as official talks from Google and MySpace on some of the standards.

As the OpenSocial developer community grows its base among official containers and independent application developers, the main focus for the future of OpenSocial is to encourage all individuals, regardless of company affiliation, to contribute to the community as a whole. At today's event we saw the true meaning of open and social, where companies who've traditionally been at odds are sharing impressive technologies. Competitors are allowing open access to their platforms and tools with the hope of delivering an ungated community for developers and all users as a

Seedcamp is an intensive week long event held in September in London for young entrepreneurs and founders from across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, to provide mentorship, seed funding, and world-class connections for startups.

Some of this year's winning teams were in Silicon Valley this week. They stopped in at Yahoo! to hear about our offering of tools, open services, and APIs for developers.

Tom Hughes-Croucher sits down with Michael Gloess from toksta*, a free instant messenger, which is easy to implement and customize for a social networking site or forum. toksta* IM enables your users to chat via text chat or webcam in real time.

Seedcamp is an intensive week-long event held in September in London for young entrepreneurs and company founders from across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, to provide mentorship, seed funding, and world-class connections for startups.

Some of this year's winning teams were in Silicon Valley this week. They stopped in at Yahoo! to hear about our offering of tools, open services, and APIs for developers.

Tom Hughes-Croucher sits down with Francois Lagunas & Nicolas Steegmann from Stupeflix, a really cool video generator which allows users to upload pictures, music, videos, and text and let the Stupeflix API cook up a compelling movie mixing them all:

Seedcamp is an intensive week-long event held in September in London for young entrepreneurs and company founders from across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, to provide mentorship, seed funding, and world-class connections for startups.

Some of this year's winning teams were in Silicon Valley this week. They stopped in at Yahoo! to hear about our offering of tools, open services, and APIs for developers.

Tom Hughes-Croucher sits down with Richard Healy and Simon Best from Basekit to learn more about what they do:

On a beautiful afternoon last week, I boarded a plane bound for Brazil along with Zach Graves, coworker, ActionScript developer on the Yahoo! Application Platform, and author of the Y! OS ActionScript SDK. Thirteen leg-cramping hours later, we descended through rain clouds and over forested hills interspersed with estates and farms, to land in São Paulo, the location of the first ever Brazil Open Hack Day.

At one point in the long ride from the airport to the city, we crested a hill and caught our first glimpse of the metropolitan area: a jagged, white wall of skyscrapers stretched across our entire field of view. Yahoo!'s São Paulo office is located in a bustling commercial district. From my room on the 22nd floor of a hotel just down the block, I was treated to another perspective of the city: looking between and across the tops of high-rises as far as I could see - the city is as deep as it is wide. And it's growing. Directly across the street another tower was under construction

Recently I had the chance to read through "The Art of Capacity Planning" by John Allspaw (Engineering Manager, Operations at Flickr). To be honest, I thought I would be poring through mathematical theory on the implementation of capacity planning in this book, logging facts and high-level theory into my head but only retaining half or less of it. I was happily surprised that I was completely wrong.

This book ran through the practical implementation of capacity planning from an operations point of view, pointing out commonsense solutions to real-world problems using practical examples from Flickr and other companies along the way. I want to reiterate the "commonsense" portion of my last statement. John is clear to state that many times the easiest solutions are the best. This may be commonsense for everyone, but how many of us actually use this approach? Most of the time, whether in operations, software engineering, or website development, I see engineers take an approach that

Last weekend hundreds of Brazilian (and other Latin American) hackers came to the Senac University in Sao Paulo, Brazil to compete, meet and share information at the Open Hack Day.

I arrived a day early to help the local team plan the tech talks and set up the hack day. I was joined later by my Sunnyvale colleagues Erik Eldridge and Zach Graves and we distributed the topics we wanted to talk to the hackers about. We ended up covering the whole spectrum of the Yahoo Open Strategy - YQL, YAP, BOSS, SearchMonkey, oAuth and so on. With the help of local colleagues (who presented in Portuguese and thus making it easier for hackers) we also covered the basics of ethical hacking, where to find mashable data and how to approach a hack.

The hack day was organized into a few hours of tech talks, followed by hours and hours of hacking, playing games (Wii, Air Hockey, Table Football, a real pinball machine and some Brazilian version of table football using small disks), listening to music and

Last Friday we quietly pushed an update to the BrowserPlus™
platform. This update includes better browser support and a
couple new features. More important, it makes it possible foranyone to use BrowserPlus on their own website to implement better
in-browser uploading and desktop notifications.

What's better about the upload? To start, it's easier for
end users to select the files they want to upload. You can drag
and drop files or folders directly into your web browser. An enhanced
"File Browse" implementation supports file
multi-select as well as folder select. For sites focused on the upload of photos, we've built a component that lets you manipulate images on the client before
uploading them. Once the content is selected and the image is ready to upload, our
service includes a progress bar that shows accurate upload progress. The PhotoDrop demo shows how all of these features come together for a smooth and intuitive photo-editing and in-browser upload experience.